Midnight Clear

It was the first Christmas Eve I was going to be alone. The grown kids were far flung. Meg was somewhere in the middle of the Pacific on an oceanographic expedition. I was holding down the fort. The fort was on the outskirts of a college town, neither rural nor urban.

In the afternoon there were a few flakes in the air. A couple of hours later the flakes called in reinforcements and soon snow was piling up. No matter to me. I wound the mantel clock to make sure it sounded at midnight. I put on some Keith Jarrett, built a fire in the fireplace, downed a reliable edible and sat in the flame’s glow with my fingers wrapped around a scotch.

A heavy thump on my front door took me out of this reverie. I thought I’d imagined it and sat up, waiting. After a while a small but insistent knock came and I was awake enough to realize someone was outside. I gathered myself and went to the door. I opened it to swirling snow and a figure that looked like an apparition. It was a man way past his prime, soaked to the skin, ice clinging to his beard, a slouch hat shading his eyes. It seemed as if a nudge would crack the ice and have him in shards on the floor. I invited him in.

Once in the soft light of my living room he seemed more human. He shuffled but not robotically. It looked like he was thawing. He stared at the fire I’d built, which was in need of another log. I motioned for him to sit in Meg’s chair and he did. He didn’t seem to want to talk so I just watched the fire with him for a few minutes. We have strange people show up on our doorstep all the time, at least we did when Sandy was young. She scooped up every lost soul in town and brought them home and fixed them up and sent them to the proper agencies. Guess what Sandy does for a living.

After a while I could see this man was shivering and needed a change of clothes. His were threadbare though they were made of heavy weaves. Odd. He was the same size as I, it seemed, so I went upstairs, fished out some sturdy pants and a shirt and sweater and took them down to him. He didn’t balk at the clothes but stood up immediately and started stripping off his wet pants and underpants. I turned away and went to the kitchen to get him a hot tea.

When I returned he was sitting serenely in Meg’s chair, absorbing the warmth of the fire. He accepted the tea as if he had ordered it. I thought I should ask questions about how he got to my doorstep but that line of questioning seemed superficial. This guy had something deeper on his mind. I didn’t have to pry. He just started in.

“Christmas Eve is the hardest for me,” he said. “Many years ago I had a break with reality on Christmas Eve.”

The fire crackled. He stared and went on.

“I tried to commit suicide and failed. I jumped into a near-frozen river and should have drowned, but I didn’t. I don’t know how I got out of the river but when I did, I was in another reality. There was an angel and there was a life I could have lived. Hmm. I just went along with the whole charade. It was crazy. I went home and there was this big family and my problems were all solved and we were supposed to live happily ever after. But, uh, that didn’t happen.”

He looked at me now like I was an old friend. He had unburdened himself some and he wanted to gauge whether or not he could go further.

“I’ve had a hard life. When you see something that is not seen by others, when you live in a dream, it can be ecstasy or ruin. As you can see it’s been the latter for me. I’m a broken man.”

He said this last with a twinkle to beat any twinkle ever twinkled. He was punking me, as my kids say. His thawed face in the firelight was mischievous. There was another knock on the door.

I opened it to Tom Stevens, a newbie on the police force, a contemporary of my son Travis, a nice guy. He was swathed in an increased snowfall, his hat trimmed with flakes. Like most of Travis’s friends he called me by my first name. Then.

“We hear a vagrant showed up on your doorstep tonight. That right?”

“Tom,” I said, “He’s kind of lost. Do you know anything about him?”

“Well, yes. His family’s from Cedar Post or somewhere over there and they are worried, say he does this every year. I’ve come to take him to the station and they’ll pick him up.”

“Just have the family come here,” I said with such authority Travis relayed it to his superiors and we were set.

My guest had finished his tea. I told him his family was coming to pick him up. He stared into the fire.

“It all seemed so real,” he said. “This angel saved me and then I went back to my family and there was more love in that house than you could imagine. Was that real?”

Now I was having my doubts about the reality of what I was seeing. Did I spin out with the edible and the scotch? It’s happened.

The knock on the door made us both jump. I stood and opened to a gorgeous young woman with a retro haircut, short and curly, a cowled sweater, and a smile to break your heart. She looked beyond me and sort of clucked when she saw the man by the fire. Then she looked up at me with a wonderful grace.

“Thank you so much. I hope he wasn’t too much of a bother.”

I fell instantly in love and imagined trying to tell Meg we were through. Then I pulled myself together and said he was a welcome guest. I was starting to ask about his past when he unexpectedly stood up, raced toward the door, and brushed by me without a word of goodbye. His lovely family member gave me a “sorry about that” look and turned to follow my mysterious guest down to her car. They disappeared in the gathering snow and the last thing I heard was her voice in the flakes.

“Grandpa George. C’mon. Over here.”

I continued to watch until they had left and snow was doing its dance all alone. Could it have been him? Had I imagined it all? I turned back to the room, expecting to see his clothes piled near the fireplace, but they were gone. Had he taken them with him?

The mantel clock chimed midnight. It was Christmas. An imaginary man was flying over rooftops delivering toys. Millions of TV screens were tuned to a classic about a man helped by an angel. Suddenly the mantel clock sounded, a ping instead of its chime. I knew what that meant. But I couldn’t tell if I’d really heard it.